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Ubuntu Looking Again At Rolling Release Model

02-28-2013, 11:50 AM

Phoronix: Ubuntu Looking Again At Rolling Release Model

Canonical developers are again taking a serious look at moving Ubuntu over to a rolling-release model. Under this form, there would be the Ubuntu Long-Term Support (LTS) releases every two years but between that new packages would be pushed out on a rolling-release basis...

I really hope they do this, 6 month release cycle is very flawed. the interim releases are usually shoved out way before they can be considered "ready", and personally I much prefer rolling release then having to use a bunch of ppa's to keep things up to date, and doing major upgrades every 6 months.

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Well i think rolling release model is ok but they should keep that lts still going too. I think one big flaw on rolling release is that the packages get released too early and lack documentation/examples or ready configuration files and many distros just keep changing the configuration form. So the old config doesnt work out-of-the-box.

Thou its undeestandable if the package is under heavy maintenance but thats just the thing that makes release cycle distros better compared to rolling release. Trying to say that packages that gets released via rolling arent well enough tested.

And to be noted using chakra linux which basicly arch linux port. Kind of disliked arch as they didnt bother to write any good systemd config/support wiki for a change and ppl just needed to do everything by themself. Chakra had it all ready and has way more stable kde support.

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Well i think rolling release model is ok but they should keep that lts still going too. I think one big flaw on rolling release is that the packages get released too early and lack documentation/examples or ready configuration files and many distros just keep changing the configuration form. So the old config doesnt work out-of-the-box.

Thou its undeestandable if the package is under heavy maintenance but thats just the thing that makes release cycle distros better compared to rolling release. Trying to say that packages that gets released via rolling arent well enough tested.

And to be noted using chakra linux which basicly arch linux port. Kind of disliked arch as they didnt bother to write any good systemd config/support wiki for a change and ppl just needed to do everything by themself. Chakra had it all ready and has way more stable kde support.

I'm not sure why everyone assumes a rolling release means packages will be released early. To me rolling release means, release the packages when they're ready. Under the current 6 month release cycle, changes are hurried and forced due to the 6 month deadline. A rolling release means there is no such deadline(it would basically be a 2 year deadline).

As a side benefit it also means users might not have to wait 6 months to get an updated version of LibreOffice, Empathy, Transmission, etc. The solution to this now is to have ten billion PPAs, which I really hate. Many packages, especially top level applications, are inconsequential to update. For them to be held to a 6 month update cycle is a bit ridiculous in my opinion.

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...but I think they are talking about "Rolling Release" but not in a way most people expect it.

They seem to be describing something like a very long beta period, where packages are upgraded frequently, and things can land "whenever they're ready", but don't seem to describe much in a way of control and testing of stability. As in "if I have auto-update on, will my pc boot tomorrow?".

Daily Quality means that developers can ensure their components are stable
and useful before they upload, and our processes protect us from most
mistakes these days.

Honestly, if what we get is a choice between LTS and works-most-of-the-time-beta, most people will go LTS. So instead of having new versions of software 6 months apart, it will now be 2 years? Hm...

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Honestly, if what we get is a choice between LTS and works-most-of-the-time-beta, most people will go LTS. So instead of having new versions of software 6 months apart, it will now be 2 years? Hm...

You don't seem to understand what a rolling release model is. It is obvious you have never used a rolling release distro like Arch...

It seems there are many myths widely spread in the Linux world. One such myth is that the latest software is unstable, while it is not. Alpha and beta versions of upstream software are indeed unstable at times, but when something is released as a stable version it is stable, period. Minus minor bugs that most of the time existed in previous versions too...

People seem to think that Debian for example is more stable as a system than Arch, while it is not in any way... In fact, when a distro uses 2 year old software, it lacks many features and bug/security fixes upstream has worked on... You cannot depend on distro maintainers to look at the source of every package and backport all the fixes... It is insane, and leads to many troubles...

Stability also depends on what is changed. Sure, using a brand new kernel, Xorg or Mesa version might lead to new bugs, but using the latest Firefox/Libreoffice/Transmission etc doesn't affect total system stability at all.

So there won't be a works-most-of-the-time-beta as you said. There will be a works-like-the-latest-LTS-plus-it-has-newer-end-user-software... And this is something most desktop Ubuntu users would certainly welcome...

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You don't seem to understand what a rolling release model is. It is obvious you have never used a rolling release distro like Arch...

It seems there are many myths widely spread in the Linux world. One such myth is that the latest software is unstable, while it is not. Alpha and beta versions of upstream software are indeed unstable at times, but when something is released as a stable version it is stable, period. Minus minor bugs that most of the time existed in previous versions too...

People seem to think that Debian for example is more stable as a system than Arch, while it is not in any way... In fact, when a distro uses 2 year old software, it lacks many features and bug/security fixes upstream has worked on... You cannot depend on distro maintainers to look at the source of every package and backport all the fixes... It is insane, and leads to many troubles...

Stability also depends on what is changed. Sure, using a brand new kernel, Xorg or Mesa version might lead to new bugs, but using the latest Firefox/Libreoffice/Transmission etc doesn't affect total system stability at all.

So there won't be a works-most-of-the-time-beta as you said. There will be a works-like-the-latest-LTS-plus-it-has-newer-end-user-software... And this is something most desktop Ubuntu users would certainly welcome...

Because more updates and newer versions must mean unstable... right? I agree people call Arch "bleeding edge" all the time and as someone who used/uses Arch for a good few years on the testing repo's aka the "unstable" repo's I've hardly have had any problems. Arch has been by far the most stable and enjoyable Linux distro thus far that I've used over the years. I think it would be perfect if it just had an graphical installer so I could actually recommend people use it.

I think Ubuntu switching to a rolling release model would be a great idea so long as they do it right. I like having up to date software as a user and as a developer I like to have the latest libraries without having to compile them myself.

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You don't seem to understand what a rolling release model is. It is obvious you have never used a rolling release distro like Arch...

Let's just say I had used and gotten bored of gentoo BEFORE ubuntu & arch ever existed.

The thing is, I can't honestly recommend the rolling release to a friend or family member if it doesn't get testing. Have you met KDE .0 stable releases? I'm not talking 4.0 trolling here, but even running 4.10.0 I've ran into some issues already. Other packages might be better or worse. But users shouldn't be the ones to find out.

Just saying "if upstream kicks it out, it's ready" is not an acceptable form of testing. Of course ubuntu is free and I can't make them do what I want, but I'm commenting that I dislike this plan if there won't be steps taken so that stability is not affected compared to running a non-lts release now.